How the West was won

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First came Crouching Tiger. Now Zhang Yimou's
Hero has cut a swathe through Western audiences. Can the
Chinese invasion be far behind? Stephanie Bunbury
reports.

For a while there, it seemed Miramax would sit on Zhang Yimou's
first foray into martial-arts films, Hero, forever. Two
years after it first screened at the Berlin Film Festival,
Hero had become the biggest boxoffice film of all time in
China and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang's next film, had
been invited to Cannes. There was still no sign of Hero in
Western cinemas, however. Rumours as to why, zapped around like
star knives.

Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax supremo, was well known for buying
up foreign films only to ensure that nobody else could have them.
Was he up to these old tricks again? On the other hand, he had paid
$US21 million for the distribution rights to Hero, a
record amount for a Chinese film, so it did seem rather
unlikely.

Perhaps it was simply that, even after the huge success of Ang
Lee' s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which
grossed $US128 million in the US alone, post-9/11 audiences were
not ready for a film about warrior mercenaries working on behalf of
kings with imperial ambitions.

There were not even any bankable stars in Hero. Jet Li,
who plays a master swordsman who arrives in the medieval court of
King Qin offering his incomparable services, is a household name to
a billion people, but they were the wrong billion for Miramax.

He had appeared in Western films, most notably Lethal Weapon
4 with Mel Gibson, and there were an unknown number of Western
devotees of martial-arts movies for whom Jet Li was and is
unquestionably the business.

But would these dudes come out to support a big, operatic
tragedy full of magnificent scenery and the sensibility of a lyric
poem? You couldn't count on it and counting, once you are talking
about selling tickets, is the name of the game. Was Hero
fabulous? Unquestionably. But would it work? Nobody really
knew.

Then, in late August last year, Miramax moved its major slice of
action into position, supported by a marketing campaign as slick as
a combat master's sword play.

Working in the wake of it success with Quentin Tarantino's
Kill Bill, the studio had Tarantino himself promote Zhang
Yimou's film in a campaign aimed at the multiplex audience, with a
"Quentin Tarantino presents" tag added to the film's title and a
trailer for Hero included on the Kill Bill DVD.
Then the country was blitzed with television promotions and
advertising. And it worked.

Maggie Cheung Man Yuk as Snow.

In its first weekend, Hero took $US18 million and shot to the
number- one spot in the boxoffice listings. It was still there the
following week too. Even Bill Kong, the Hong Kong producer who
backed both Crouching Tiger and Hero, was
surprised. "It is the people in the midwest, people in the south,
not just the metropolitan areas, who are going to see it," he said
as Hero kept its charttopping spot. "That is a
surprise."

At first sight, Hero fits firmly into the genre
conventions as understood and accepted by audiences throughout the
Chinese diaspora. Like so many of its predecessors, it is set in
the so-called Warring States period more than 2000 years ago, when
clans from seven kingdoms battled to gain control of the whole
country.

Most of these films begin with a preamble describing who the
various clan leaders are, their allegiances and alliances and what
slight and consequent loss of face has provoked the particular
conflict that drives the film you are about to see. As a
non-Chinese you will be lucky to remember any of this information
10 minutes into the film, but it generally doesn't matter. You will
soon know whose side you are supposed to be on: the guy with the
nicest hair is a fairly safe bet.

But that isn't the point. The point is to convey the atmosphere
of a country in a permanent state of civil war. The fighting class
we see grew up with war, spent their lives honing their fighting
skills and then often hired themselves out as mercenaries. There is
no dishonour in being a sword for hire, since the true warrior has
a code of honour intrinsic to the way of the sword, as they might
say, that has nothing much to do with the cause the sword serves.
Anyway, at this distance in time and space it is impossible to tell
which of these regional demagogues were the good guys and which
ones the bad. The filmmaker chooses our hero for us and then,
whoosh, we're away on the ride.

Zhang works from within this convention but, as one might expect
from the director of Raise the Red Lantern and Ju
Dou, he turns it inside out in the process. His film is full
of brilliant warriors all working at cross-purposes, none of them
admirable: the hero of the title could be any or none of them. Jet
Li's character, Nameless, is first seen offering his services to
the Qin leader, the target of numerous assassins, of whom the most
terrifying are the undefeated Steel, Snow and Sky. Nameless then
reveals that he has already killed them with a mixture of fighting
prowess and remarkable cunning, a story the king is keen to
hear.

The story unfolds and we see Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung, Tony
Leung and Jet Li alternately romance and stalk each other, bound by
their own peculiar ideas of purity to kill those they admire and
love.

"Everyone in every audience has a different perception of who
the hero is - me, Maggie, Tony," says Jet Li. "In my mind, if there
is no hero, this is in itself heroic, because then we have to ask
the question, When do we need heroes?' In times of war and
catastrophe, we need heroes to emerge. But if we were able to live
gracefully together on the planet and with nature, we wouldn't need
them."

Jet speaks carefully, through a translator, to his Berlin
audience, maintaining the kind of stillness only years of physical
discipline allows. Speaking to him feels more like having an
audience with Kublai Khan than a chat to a guy who makes his dosh
kicking other people's necks.

One reason Harvey Weinstein held Hero back is,
supposedly, because he did not want it lumped with Jackie Chan's
film The Medallion, which came out in 2003. There were
obvious comparisons to be made by eager reporters between the two
stars. Like Chan, Jet Li was steered into martial arts at a very
early age. By the time he was nine, he was firmly ensconced in the
Beijing Martial Arts Academy. Two years later he was a national
champion. By his midteens, he was coaching athletics after winning
the National Martial Arts Championship title four times. He retired
at 20, when the film offers began rolling in.

His first film, made in 1979, was Shaolin Temple, by
Chang Hsin Yen. It was an instant hit, kick-starting the kung-fu
craze that swept China and its enormous diaspora in the 80s
and making an instant screen star of its athletic hero. He followed
it with a succession of wham-bam hits, including two more films in
the Shaolin series.

Nobody talked about whether Jet Li could act or not. He was Jet
Li and he could really kick ass. What more did he need to do?

Jet Li knew he could kick ass, but he could see no reason why
films structured around martial arts should be brainless; the
physical disciplines they feature are, after all, rigorously
cerebral. Hero suggests that combat is part of nature's
poetry. The fights, beautifully balletic even by the genre's
romantic standards, are woven seamlessly into magnificent natural
settings.

In one scene in an oak forest, loose leaves were sorted and
rated for the perfection of their autumnal golden colouring, then
showered in their thousands according to their grading.
Hero has plenty of swashbuckling and flying pigtails, but
it is also as sumptuous as a Puccini opera. "Action is a vehicle,
not an aim in itself," says Jet Li. "I'm looking for a story, a
plot. If I like it, I don't care if it's action or anything
else."

Hero was exactly the right story. "When I read the
script, I cried twice," he says. "In my 22-year career of making
movies, this is the first script that made me weep. It is an
incredible story and a very important question about what kind of
person we can call a hero.

"Myself, I am under the influence of Chinese philosophy. This
makes me judge things from both sides rather than one. Normally in
action films you have one person who has been insulted and seeks
revenge, but what happens now is that they realise they will gain
nothing by killing them. They should, rather, seek to change the
enemy."

It is a comforting philosophy, even if it does include a
disconcerting suggestion that behaviour modification is the new
version of victory. Other questions, however, have been raised
about the story in China, where Hero has been as
controversial as it has been popular. Chinese cinema-goers are very
familiar with Emperor Qin, a real historic figure and definitive
tyrant, his name immediately conjuring an image of cruelty and
despotism after the style, say, of Ivan the Terrible. Not so in
Hero. Here, the Qin king is a moderniser determined to
bring all of China's unruly states into harmony, even if he must
dodge swords right and left to do it: something of a Napoleon,
perhaps, albeit of an earlier era.

In China, censorship means that even a sword-and-sorcery
narrative is read for layers of political meaning. This new slant
on bad old Qin has accordingly been interpreted as an apologia for
dictatorship in general and, more particularly, for the
dictatorship that rules China now. Has Zhang Yimou, a longstanding
dissident filmmaker whose earlier movies were just as eagerly read
for their implicit attacks on the government, sold out?

Absolutely not, he insists. "People say, You used to be a
rebel and now you are pandering to the authorities'; that is
something they put forward in the media," Zhang says. "But no
director would create an anti-government hero, because you can go
into exile very easily. That is just the reality that is there and
that is the problem you have to deal with."

His cast has rallied to support him. "I think this comes from
jealousy of Zhang Yimou being accepted by the Government this time
- his film is not banned for once and is a huge success at the box
office," says Maggie Cheung. "So people are finding things to
complain about and say he has wrong intentions. People who are not
into the king say, Yeah, you are just trying to kiss-ass the
Government and do something right for a change so they will support
you and love you'. To me, this is like a joke."

Unsurprisingly, Jet Li is quite Zen about the whole debate
around Hero. "Different people perceive the film in
different ways," he says. "What is told to us here about the
historical characters is that they tried to lessen the suffering of
the people at the time. They didn't know what that emperor would do
later. Now we have a different opinion of him. People may have
different views of unification, of bringing different regional
cultures into one Chinese culture - you can compare it to today's
Europe, liked by some but not others."

This is nonsense, surely: of course you can't compare it to
Europe. But it isn't the nonsense of a press presentation; Jet Li
is genuinely trying to show that we are all alike. "When you see
the Great Wall at the end," says Zhang Yimou, "you know, that was
Jet Li's idea; also the idea that they wanted peace. He said,
You have to tell people that we didn't build the Great Wall
because we wanted to conquer Iraq; we wanted to protect ourselves'.
He feels China has been very misunderstood in the West."

No more, perhaps. The success of Hero in the US leaves
the Chinese film industry in an unprecedented mood of optimism as
local producers line up for a greater share of the lucrative
dollar-based market. Woody Tsing, the chief executive of the Hong
Kong Motion Picture Industry Association, believes the industry
should aim to have 10 to 15 successful titles a year released in
the US within a decade. It seems a tall order, but a few years ago
nobody could have imagined the popcorn audience going to see a film
in Chinese. "Maybe they have tired of the old movie formulas," says
Bill Kong.

Maybe. If so, a billion people know exactly where they can find
some new ones.